Saturday, August 23, 2014

This blog was once a place for poems—it was where I started
to speak about the things I saw in the world. It gave me the courage to think I was good enough to be a poet. I
am, but it’s all potential. It’s the same potential we all have; we are each languaged.
For some reason God has me here now, in Raleigh. I’ll have two years to
continue what Mobile, what God through DLM, started. And that’s just another
two years toward naming the predicament of the soul. Percy, O’Connor,
Montgomery—may they be brought to the Vision of God—began it, but not alone. They
left signposts in this strange land. God used those to move my heart to
Raleigh. He used them to make me a poet. So help me God.

And here begins my first letter to Mobile, to Alabama, to Honors.

A heart can wander to odd places, compelled by memory of a life it has not yet
lived, and it can settle there and learn there and love there. Thus I am in
North Carolina. I never thought I was
Southern prior to NC—meaning I wasn’t a farm boy, I never dipped Skoal, and my
vehicle didn’t have a bed of any form. But that’s not all of the South. It’s in
our language, it’s hesitating on the highway to let someone in, it’s building a
fire on an 85 degree night just to scare the mosquitos thirsty for the pure sweet-tea
sugar bubbling out of your skin. That doesn’t happen here. Not everyone
understands the three types of door holding: pulling, push-and-lean, and
push-and-step-through. And no matter how many times I say “mo-BEEL,” people
will always correct me subtly with “MO-bile” or, at best “MO-beel.”

Very often either the Old South or God has come up in conversation. I’m not
complaining. The second is glorious, and people are very accepting. The first
is strange for my earlier statement: I never thought I was a Southerner. But
Walker Percy was right. The South looks less and less like the South every day.
And I think people feel that here, too. In some groaning beyond words, people pay
a slight homage to the South when we talk. We all miss it. It is cornbread and
sheets on the line and that overwhelming chicken litter smell thanks to all
three neighbors. Not everyone knows that first hand, but they sense it in me.
And it goes back to our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Even with the best
human effort any man in the free world could muster, we still fell short before
the Lord. We even fell short of our own ideals. And we all feel a loss in that.

Beyond the South, it feels weird not walking through a door, beating my chest,
and shouting ,“Tantum e tenebris receptum
constabit!” It feels weirder not staring straight into the eyes of
Stonewall and saying, “A group of friends seeking the truth of things in love.”
But it’s there. That hot iron has forever scorched the seal of Honors into the
breast of every one it touched, both in class and beyond UM. And praise God
that M walked that with me. She’s bears it, too. Now He has me here. And I have
two years. I have two years and two hundred thousand to love, to show love, to
enter darkness, to live and trust and learn and die. To suffer into truth. And
to live again at the sound of the Word.